Arabelle Sicardi

1 month ago | arabellesicardi.substack.com | Arabelle Sicardi

I don’t have a think piece or news angle for you right now; I am busy with five thousand projects - wedding! book promo planning! more book stuff! a nonprofit launch! nose training! - and thus my life has narrowed down to incredibly detailed Notion dashboards, Google Calendars, excel spreadsheets, and lying on the grass in my backyard, exchanging long audio notes with friends from around the world. Here are some of my life updates right now.

2 months ago | arabellesicardi.substack.com | Arabelle Sicardi

I went to AWP - the Authors and Writers Conference - for the first time this year after years of studiously avoiding it. I am an introvert and grew up in literary circles in NYC, so going out of my way to meet people who often want parasocial gossip on my real-life friends or exes has always seemed strange.

2 months ago | archyde.com | Arabelle Sicardi

by Arabelle Sicardi, Archyde.comMarch 23, 2025China’s space program is sending planarian flatworms to its space station to study their remarkable regenerative capabilities in microgravity, potentially offering insights into human aging and tissue repair. The experiment builds on prior research wiht zebrafish and fruit flies in space. Planarians: The Indestructible Worms Headed to SpaceBEIJING—Imagine a creature that, if cut in half, coudl grow back into two complete, identical organisms.

2 months ago | arabellesicardi.substack.com | Arabelle Sicardi

I love going to spas and consider spa culture part of my cultural inheritance as an Asian, even if spa culture can often feel unwelcoming as a nonbinary person. I’ve written about spas a few times over the years assessing both angles – this piece for ALLURE on unwelcoming spa culture and this piece for REAL LIFE on how oftentimes spa culture is hand in hand with imperial statecraft; that is to say, beauty and war are historically often intertwined.

Feb 4, 2025 | arabellesicardi.substack.com | Arabelle Sicardi

Recently a PR email landed in my inbox that I wasn’t sure was actually real or not: Neutrogena’s Collagen Bank. I have gotten plenty of much more bizarre beauty emails, to be honest, but the cringe perfection of such a product name felt so on-the-nose on society’s fixation with forever youth that I was initially hoping it was made up. It also felt so perfectly timed with a project I’ve been working on for months myself - a response to this very engine of the fear of growing older.